Water footprint and virtual water for iPhone

Saturday, April 28, 2012

The Aral Sea has the particularity to have a relatively low depth compared to its large surface.
As water evaporation is proportional to the surface, the lake is somewhat suffering from this surface/depth ration.

One way to fight evaporation is to reduce the water surface while keeping some volume in depth.
The smaller Aral Sea has been isolated with the Kokaral Dam from the Greater Sea in the 90's. The dike was damaged during a storm in 2002 and water was lost to the South Aral Sea. Finally the dam was repaired in 2005.

Today, this lake has recovered: the average depth in the small sea is about 40 m and salinity has decreased enough to reintroduce some local fishing.
Dams are relatively cheap to build and their result is immediate.
The only drawback of such solution in the South is that the most populated area (East) would be sacrificed.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Water labelling

A new function called "Shopping" is helping you doing a more sustainable market in terms of fresh water resources preservation.

Choose a food product, a country of origin and see a label going from A to G.
The label is measuring the impact on local water resources during production.

The calculation is taken into account 3 factors:

- the water footprint of the product
Meat requiring more water than vegetables.

- the quality of the water used
Green (rain) water being more renewable than blue (irrigation) and grey water (pollution from fertilizers).

- the water available per capita in the country of origin
Growing food in Canada has clearly less impact than in semi-arid countries like South Africa for instance.

Other features added:

- performances improvement on the water footprint calculator
- the menu has been reworked somehow
- a mini guide is present on each major function
- products have been reorganized
- some minor data fixes

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Freshwater Mountains

As we know, potable water is a rare resource in many countries.
A French team - led by Frederic Mougin - has been working on a crazy project to use gigantic freshwater pools which never have been exploited: icebergs !

Unlike floe ice, which consists of frozen sea-water and is populated by wild animals, icebergs are drifting mountains of fresh water. Calved from polar glaciers and continental icecaps, icebergs drift naturally in the ocean until they melt. Each year, tens of thousands of icebergs are produced this way from glaciers, all destined to melt and be lost in the oceans’ salt waters. And each year, the equivalent of a year’s consumption of potable water melts and disappears.

From Greenland to Canary islands

Foreseen 2012, a huge tabular iceberg of 30 millions of town will be towed from Newfoundland (after a natural drift from the Western cost of Greenland) to the Canary islands which are lacking of water.
Every technical expect has been carefully studied: shape of the giant, risk of fracture, melt estimate, negligible impact on the crossed ecosystems, and much more.

Capitalistic view?

We should admire this technical challenge and wish go luck to the project team !

However, before pretending that iceberg carrying would a solution to water scarcity, there are several things to consider.

This experience seems a typical capitalist and old-fashionned way of thinking. Water is missing ? Well, let's plunder another water source !
This is true for every mineral resource on earth: priority is given on mining before sparing.

A more sensible and modern aproach could be: let's try to understand and to lessen/adapt our water consumption.

Using modern agriculture techniques, reducing exports of crop products and importing food products whose culture is water intensive, may certainly cut down the water footprint of Canarias.

Old Arabic dream

Such idea of retrieving fresh water from ice is not completely new. It emerged in the 70's in Saudi Arabia.
Since, the clever Saudis have found a better virtual source of clean water: crop and live-stock products, imported from country having a better climate ;-)

Credits: Mehdi Belatara

Indeed, food products are virtually containing water up to thousands of time their weight. Transporting them is far more simpler, cheaper and less polluting than this big iceberg hunting.